Imaging jobs in imaging systems including printers, facsimile machines, and scanners are used to define operations such as scaling, translation, mirroring or reflecting, and rotation. Different imaging devices behave differently. This different behavior many times occurs across imaging devices from the same manufacturer. The order-of-operation scaling, translation, reflecting, and rotation is noncommutative across devices. Stated differently, if the order of a set of transformation changes, the end results are typically different. Frequently, only through an iterative trial and error process, a user will get an imaging job to run as desired. This inconsistent behavior of imaging devices is even more acute with devices from different manufacturers. One example of an imaging device is a multifunction device (MFD). The MFD is an office or light production machine which incorporates the functionality of multiple devices in one. This multiple functionality includes printing, scanning, faxing, viewing and copying. MFDs provide a smaller footprint as well as centralized document management, document distribution and document production in a large-office setting
Many times devices or fleets of devices, even from the same manufacturer, often use different origins and coordinate spaces from system to system for images, sheets, and devices including image processors, mechanical, scanning and xerographic sub-systems. Imaging operations such as device scaling, translation, reflection, rotation and edge erase are relative to a coordinate space (in particular to its origin) so behavior can and often will be different across MFD models. Scanners will often have varying origins and scanning directions so saving scanned images may give inconsistent visual image to raster image orientations. Print and Copy/Scan sometimes use different orientations as well, resulting in different results for each path (often unintentionally and undesirable). For example, scaling is relative to origin, so scaling down or up (reduce/enlarge) may result in different image registration or clipping regions. Origins and order of operation are often fixed on a device, not allowing the user to select a different origin (i.e., a particular corner, the center, or an arbitrary point in the imaging frame) or order of operation. MFDs may possibly rotate in either clockwise or counter clockwise directions.
Origins can be further differentiated to be relative to input or output “spaces”. More generally these spaces are vector spaces. For most purposes herein the terms “space”, “coordinate space” and “vector space” may be used interchangeably. For example, a RIPped or Copy/Scan input origin might be lower right, whereas the user may want to register to an upper left corner of the sheet and perform imaging operations relative to that origin. The challenge is to provide a framework to allow MFDs to conform to a user-definable or selectable set of behaviors. Since a device will typically have a fixed set of capability, algorithms to emulate any desired behavior would give more flexibility to the user, and to allow a suite of varying devices to behave consistently. Behaviors could be defined for a given job, or configured by an administrator as part of a policy used across all jobs. Decoupling user experience from device behavior gives additional flexibility to engineering designs and component choices. FIG. 1 illustrates, by way of example, a front top perspective of two models of MFDs, each with different origins and different coordinate space. Origin 104 is at the lower left corner on platen 115 of a Model A machine. Origin 154 is at the upper right corner on platen 165 of Model B machine. The Xerox Logo is used to easily understand the different coordinate spaces along with their unique origins.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for transforming coordinates from a first coordinate space to a second coordinate space in an imaging device.